


Bodies of Work

by JackieSnax



Category: Starling (Story), Starling Story, Starlingstory
Genre: Alien Culture, Alien/Human Relationships, Aliens, Gen, M/M, Science Fiction, Social Anxiety, coupled with a terrible Ruby Bridges in space kinda situation, i took some guesses there
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-21
Updated: 2015-04-21
Packaged: 2018-03-25 02:10:22
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,112
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3792691
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JackieSnax/pseuds/JackieSnax
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jet Calabi’s face has been omnipresent in your life, ever since he killed a tenth of your planet in one go. Now his portraits lord over prisons and hospitals, smiling on at the survivors. Your interactions with each artistic rendition of the war criminal are largely the same, though Astris is the first time you’ll ever interact with a speaking one.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bodies of Work

**Author's Note:**

> Ok this took way too long to write, but it’s DONE NOW mostly thanks to Makenzie (audible-smiles on tumblr), beta extraordinaire, ruler of my pen sword and heart. ____s are for stuff we don’t know the names of yet. Enjoy.

First, it’s the poster in your history classroom. It’s the room you take the aptitude test in, and he stares down at you with bared teeth the whole time, jaw clenched, big human mouth curled back around the incisors and cowl flopped down near his brow. He’s there on the rare moments you don’t know an answer and you sit up to look around, thinking hard and tapping your claws on the desk. He watches after when the human woman and your biological mother come in and start talking about an ‘opportunity’ you qualify for. You should be very excited. It’s a great honor. You have been selected out of many. Your training begins tomorrow.

The human flashes teeth like the picture when she tells you. She’s smiling at you - telling you something good. And Jet Calabi doesn’t change, of course.

Your mother looks scared but proud, the fear growing faster in her face, gnawing away at the other emotions until she tells the rest of your family at dinner. Then the children are all sent away, which is more a statement about who can contribute to the family meeting than about keeping it a secret. A few of them, after all, grew up in this house as well, so they know there were ways to listen in.

You huddle at the vent with the rest of the kids as the adults all argue about whether or not they should give you away, the littlest ones sometimes staring up at you with wide, unblinking eyes when the big things were brought up. Risks. They discuss all the risks, that night. Or all they can think of, anyway.

They always come back to what you’d heard during the meeting, however. This is an opportunity. This is a gift. Your kin are convinced slowly, spiraling down and around the idea of you, out there, until it is fact. It will happen, someday. You will go to Astris, and it will change _everything._  

-

Then, he’s in your books. He’s part of your training, though not a large part at first. Maybe a year or so before you’re set to go, his image emerges as a new aspect. A _relevant_ aspect, but not him - just the restarted him, the same face but in your age range, and you are told he’s now at the school. Everything’s the same, it’s really no big deal! Just, now the clone of the man who dropped the bomb will be there.  

“Just avoid him,” one older member of your kin says after the first class that touches on the proximity the clone will have to you during your mission. This seems to be in line with what your teachers have advised. Roy Calabi was brought up suddenly as the news came that he’d started at Astris - it seemed there’d been some uncertainty for a while, but he was there now, confusing everything. You’d gone through a single rushed slideshow of just his face, just his expressions, testing your ability to recognize them. Your teachers had dwelled on ‘rage,’ dwelled on things that make him a threat. “You’re going there to educate, but you have to remember - there’s nothing you can do for people who don’t want to learn.” You nod. That makes sense. You have no idea what it means, yet, though - not a clue. Lessons move on.

-

Then, finally, you sit under a statue of him for four hours at the spaceport. The whole thing - big arms hanging low on either side, back never straight enough to look natural (humans always look like they’ve only just managed to rise up into bipedal existence, their spines too arched and their hands like big paws fumbling over any and all delicate actions). Jet, apparently, had big hands. The statue reflected that. You hoped that maybe the whole thing was larger than the original, made bigger to make him seem more imposing. The shadow it cut stretched all the way across the room, his thick, protruding nose and ear silhouetted on the wall across from you. You wonder how big the clone is. If his fists and teeth are the same size, mostly. If you’ll be doing this alongside an angry giant that’s been taught to view everything you try to teach as an attack.

You wonder when you’ll at least get on the shuttle - it’s hours late by this point, and no one’s telling you anything. Outside you can see the sky getting dark. The shadow’s stretching longer, and it is slowly dawning on you that after all this careful planning, you still might be late - maybe even a full day late.

The day’s not over yet, though, you keep telling yourself. We’re not at that point, yet.

(You are going to be a little late - just a little late, _standard procedure_ , and he’s there, in the waiting room, right over the couch they tell you to sleep on - he looms over you and you end up staring at his face too often, after six days you try to sleep on top of the bookshelf because fuck it, fuck them, fuck that picture, you want _away_ from that face, and sleeping that close to the ground feels uneasy anyway, but you end up being lead down at gunpoint by a guard whose hand shakes, terrifyingly shakes, he’s so scared of you and you know his fear could _kill you_ and that he would stop shaking after, that nothing would happen, nothing at all, and when you’re not being threatened you’re sitting and waiting and sometimes the human diplomat will be there, and at first you’re mad at her like you’re mad at them, but then very quickly it’s that you crave her company because you _know_ her, because at least she isn’t asking you pre-loaded questions about everything from the ink you packed to some dead member of your kin’s loose involvement in the war, looming humans going abruptly from casual to spitting, yelling, slamming fists at you across the table and asking you to explain yourself without telling you what to explain, and then the sitting again, by yourself. She has you cuddled up in her lap at one point, running stubby fingers too-lightly through your crest as you sob hysterically, pathetically against her shoulder. The next day she’s on the other end of the couch and you two don’t even speak, you’re mad at her again, even more angry this time, thinking of her watching you cry like that, even though at this point you don’t think you can blame her for what’s happening. She’s fighting for you, you know that, vaguely. She lets you be mad, though. The next day she brings you granola and it’s a revelation - you’ve been choking down the bread from the sandwiches they bring you, every day a cheese sandwich, and you almost cry again. You two play chess instead. You think about Star Trek and feel laughter bubble acidic and weird in your chest, unreleased - because she’s Spock, probably, if one of you has to be Spock. You wonder if she would laugh if you told her that, but you don’t. You two don’t speak much, and you’re thankful for that. So you don’t wreck it.

You read everything you’ve brought and then again, you stare at Jet Calabi and he smiles flatly when you’re lead away again by a hard, heavy hand to the cold steel room with the two-way mirror, and everything is this weird balance between painful boredom and _that_ -)

-

There is one portrait of Jet Calabi at Astris.

You were expecting more. The way you were thinking about it was - if he’s all over Empyrean, surely the closer you get to Earth itself, the more omnipresent he is, the more _obsessed_ the humans are with this dead, violent little god of a soldier they’re so fond of. But nope - there seem to have been far more pictures of him on Empyrean itself. One in almost all of your classrooms, in fact. He is, you suppose, technically more _relevant_ , there.

As if to make up for being the one and only, this portrait of Jet is enormous. He is the only thing in the first room you enter, at the school. In the dark you can’t make out the specifics of his face, but it’s familiar enough at this point that you don’t have to. You see only his teeth, stark white and shining out of the dark at you.

The lights are out, the hall is empty. You have been delivered, finally, in the dead of night, the whole school asleep, half your belongings reaped first by the human intergalactic government and then second by the school officials - a variety of fingers poking, prodding at your notebooks and your underwear and your cleaning oils, wildly considering ways each object could be used to kill a man until you’ve got nothing left but a tiny backpack of what’s been deemed non-lethal. So you arrive small, and late, and in the dark, as if maybe all together this’ll keep people from noticing you’ve arrived at all.

You are delivered to your room by a short human about your height who you think is female - though they are introduced as ‘Dr. Chan,’ not Mr or Ms Chan, so there’s no cheat-prefix. They speak to you kindly and do not try to avoid eye-contact, for which you are grateful.

You feel barely awake - when you were finally released it was without warning. The diplomat had come back and then there were abruptly more people than you’d seen in weeks in your little space, all chattering around each other, some of them yelling, and then you’d been told to pack and lead onto the craft they’d all come here in. It hadn’t hit you at all, really, until the great swooping bounce of the shuttle pushing away from the station. You’d watched the place get smaller in the window - first very slowly and then all at once, a blip and it was gone.

You’d stared at the empty space and breathed. Felt motion beneath your feet - breathed. Didn’t cry didn’t cry didn’t cry-

Dr. Chan walks you quickly through the dimly lit hallways until you reach a door in some far-off corner of the school, then keys in a code and shows you where in your orientation doc you’ll find that code. “I guess that’s it, then. You can visit me in my office any time if you have any questions. Starting up at a new school away from home is hard even if… well, it’s hard even for your classmates,” They say, crossing their arms over their chest. Struck by inspiration you examine that, because that semester of human biology back home taught you breasts mean ‘she,’ but it’s hard to tell. There’s possibly something happening under there? You have never once seen a human chest that _didn’t_ have something extra happening there but your professor said the she-chests had more for the milk ducts, so…?

And then you remember the more-than-one-semester of human _sociology_ that’d taught you that staring particularly at this part of a human is _incredibly rude_ , so in the end you do a kind of awkward head-only bow with a quick rebound up as you say, “Er, yes… Doctor.”

She stares at you, and then, to your utter dismay, bows her own head down and quickly back up in the same jolting way you accidentally just demonstrated before saying, “Anytime! Remember that. Try to get some rest, now. Your first class is at eight am tomorrow, and I know you don’t want to be late.”

You wave goodbye to her, close the door, and lock it. Give into temptation after a moment and barricade yourself inside with the extra desk - you can move it tomorrow, it’s nothing, it’s no big deal, it’s nothing.

Then you climb up onto the top bunk, curl around your backpack and sob. After a long time you unfurl - hang up your _____ in what you think might be the top Eastern corner of the room, put your clothes away, and then go over your itinerary with shaking hands.

So that’s, what, three weeks behind? By this point you’re ideally supposed to have non-confrontationally brought up the idea of an intergalactic culture club to the few interested classmates you were supposed to suss out and start focusing in on last week.

You delete the document entirely, though there’s nothing you can do about the fact that you have it memorized. Start up a new one and work far into the morning, the _____ rotating slowly like a tiny planet in your peripheral vision.

-

The clone is exactly the same as the pictures, but has never once made the exact same facial expression. Never _once_. Possibly you have thus far been imagining him to be literally the exact same thing as the portrait, expression and all, except much shorter. He is, however, slightly rounder than the portrait, inverted of expression, and most definitely, it seems, _larger_ than Jet Calabi must’ve been. Larger than anyone you have met has ever been, probably. Even amongst his peers he _towers_ , crammed comically into chairs that creek under him, hunched forward to eat and speak to his classmates.

The classmates themselves treat him _different_ , maybe. There’s a wider berth around him in hallways, but it’s not like the space around you, and when they cross into the clone’s zone it’s with thrilled caution rather than the steely determination that has put arms over your shoulders, hands up in your feathers, breath hot and heavy and too close to you - a distinct invasion of your space coupled with a defiant baring of teeth - _You think you own this? Claim it. I dare you. Push me away._

It’s not all of them that do that. You don’t really know what you’d do if it was all of them, up in your space, taunting you, threatening you only with the barest edge of what they’re capable of so that you can’t bite back without being named instigator. Really most of them are quiet - they walk in wide circles around you, don’t make eye-contact, and stare when they think you can’t see them. And then there’s the ones who scowl - glare right at you with open hostility, jaws hard and muscles twitching in their face. They are, perhaps, the ones who stress you the least. They’re familiar - predictable, even. Humans have always looked at you like that when you intrude on what they view as _their_ territory. 

The clone’s a silent one of the first kind. He hunches like he’s trying to be smaller than he is, dodges the space he concedes as yours and always makes sure it’s double what anyone else is giving you. Probably more than anybody here, he’s staring at you, across the cafeteria, in the halls, in class. It doesn’t seem aggressive, but you can’t be sure. He looks away whenever you try to make eye-contact. Eye-contact is important, you know, with aggression. So you always give him that opportunity, because if anyone is going to actively try to harm you, you’d think it would be him, wouldn’t you. You’d rather know it was coming.

So you watch, and he watches too, but pretends he doesn’t. There’s a wire running from him to you and every time he ducks away it tightens, and you are more prepared, more ready to bite back when he doesn’t look away, when it snaps and he at last _reacts_.

When it finally happens, it’s almost a relief. Now, you know where you stand. Even if where you stand is far away, far smaller and weaker than you’ve ever felt in your life.

You know that, now.

You start dashing into the caf in the wee hours of the morning - getting sunflower seeds in a to-go cup and leaving before anyone else gets there, and then once the order finally goes through and the trail mix is cleared as non-lethal, you don’t even have to go out for food. In your room you sit facing the door, draft eight of your education plan deleted, eating slowly. You mind is blank radio static and you lean into it. These days, you feel sort of like your insides have been dislodged. It’s easier to feel when you shut your eyes. Then, gravity (such overdone gravity, here) disappears and you wobble between your own eyes, bouncing off the inside of your skull, swinging sickly in the dark until you can’t stand it anymore - you hear a sound, a creak, and it could be one of them, could be _him_ , and your eyes jolt open, catch up adrenaline-fast with the stillness of your body, and you look at the door again. The door - shut, peaceful. Your breath is too quick in the silence.

When it’s only one more day until you have to send your next report back home to your colleagues, you set up a plan for yourself. Make a few hours when you _have_ to be out of the room, tell yourself you’ll spend them talking to people, spend a few hours hovering awkwardly around different glaring crowds of classmates that seem to hate you even more now, and then you find it - the library.

The empty, lovely library. With the tall, wide shelves. No one ever goes there.

Near the back, up high, you can see all around you without even shifting.

It is so quiet, here. Technically, you’re out of your room. It’s good here. It’s _safe_ , here. Predictable. Lonely.

Until a few days later, when it’s _not_ predictable, not lonely. And then, very abruptly - nothing is.

-

The Calabi clone has dark eyes that seem just white and black and first, but there’s a ring of other color, dark brown wrinkled in with a lighter shade, all of it bursting quietly from his pupils. Brown eyes, brown hands, brown face. You like to look at him only in fractured details, like this. Focus on the little parts and it’s easier to see a different person, but sometimes you still look up and he’s the big picture, just another omnipresent portrait - the face that’s always been everywhere, and is now here, huddled under a blanket in your room, eating your food in enormous handfuls and cautiously avoiding eye-contact whenever a Star Trek character says the word ‘alien.’

Little hairs all over his face, darker and a little heavier around his mouth. That’s a good one, because the portraits never include the little hairs for some reason, even though in your own very quietly kept opinion it makes humans look much less creepy. Tiny indents indicating happiness, sometimes, when he’s smiling like now. Right on either side of his cheeks, those go - and then there’s a wrinkle up on his forehead, sometimes, when he’s focusing. Listening, and learning. You think you could lightly hold your claw over that wrinkle and keep it there, pinning it and the expression down to stay. Making sure he doesn’t go to ‘anger, aggression.’ Making sure he doesn’t go into ‘exhaustion,‘ which is your least favorite, because his willingness to listen to you seems like a depleting resource when he goes all tired like that, when you’re telling him about _all of it_ and he just gets tired.

You thought you’d be able to handle that better, but it makes you _so mad_ , so angry, and not even the kind of anger that might fuel you. You feel like nothing so far has been _that kind_ of anger. Rage just shifts quickly into crying, these days.

But he’s the only one there, sitting in your room and listening to you. The only tiny hint that everything you’ve trained for your entire life so far wasn’t just a big joke. A big waste of resources, to send someone like you out here to be blocked into a corner by all of them, crowded up until you can’t even breathe enough to try anymore, have to save every breath you can take just to keep stuttering against this big metaphorical wall.

Roy Calabi’s face is malleable. You were taught all the emotions, memorized flashcard guides to recognizing everything. But it’s different in the flesh - all just a big mess of clay and you can’t shake the feeling that he’s revealing everything whenever he reacts and you take a moment to translate. You wonder how many levels of this conversation you’re missing by finding this foreign instead of instinctive, because he’s certainly missing whole skyscrapers with you, his face trained on just yours, eyes barely flicking to your hands or your crest, noticing these key tools of communication only when they move extremely. You exaggerate them just for him - one of your best friends back home once called you _aggressively expressive_. They meant it in good fun but it made you feel self-conscious, so normally you try to hold back. But you go even harder for Roy, making everything big. It’s trouble when you think to do it, but once you start it’s actually rather therapeutic - it’s like shouting, all the time, but with your body. Which is something that really appeals to you, these days.

Shouting at all sort of appeals to you. All your words are tight little knots in your gut. Every time you untie one someone reaches down into you and ties it back up again. They do it fluidly, and you choke clumsily, and in the end you always look stupid and they always look like there are more of them than you, so they win by default. Your classmates win a lot by default.

They all move so _smoothly_ , sliding easily through every interaction - and then there’s you. Even your presence throws it off. While hiding, sometimes, you notice the difference.

(You didn’t start off this mission hiding. You started by flinching, and then clenching your jaw. Then you were sitting, stoic and proud. Then you were leaving. And now you are hiding, if you can’t leave without them noticing.)

If they don’t think you’re there, it’s all fluid, all clear. All tiny, strange gestures you can barely pick up on and can’t find exact translations for. And if you’re there - everything’s a stutter, and they can’t stop glancing back at you. They speak closed in, huddled a little more together and muttering, like they’re planning something. The first time you saw this you were scared - you thought maybe you were about to be attacked, that they were forming a plan for that, but it seemed to be nothing. They’re just huddled up against the bulk of your interruption, your weird presence throwing them off.

Which seems unfair because ‘awkwardness’ is a problem you could have definitely experienced on Empyrean in a normal school setting, but somehow being totally excluded and ostracized by ignorant space beasts hasn’t given you a pass card on the normal your-age suffering - no, you have to be _awkward_ , and know you’re awkward, and know that potentially, good social skills could have saved you, here. Could have made your mission a success. Could have changed everything, really. Just simple abject charm, and the ability to appreciate charm in others, no matter what the cost. Someone like that would’ve done better. Instead, you are here. They tested and trained you, prepared you for for all kinds of successes and failures, but you haven’t even had to face those, haven’t reached that point yet because it seems no one even considered the simpler ways you could just fail at organizing any kind of thought in a human school. They should have sent someone who wouldn’t know anything, wouldn’t try to, would just crack open and become what these children needed them to be. You know there are people who can do that - for better or worse, reach into themselves and change everything. A few of the oldest in your family, first and foremost. A few of your siblings for sure. Classmates. Friends growing up. And never you. You’ve always been a little odd, a little vaguely unpopular, maybe even. You just never cared, before. Not really. You had your own close friends, and most adults liked you. But it seems obvious in retrospect that in this instance, this flaw would matter _tenfold_. Would kill the entire thing before it started, and turn you into this, this thing you’ve become, what you’ve let them turn you into since you couldn’t shape yourself.

_Even your presence._ Across a room, not participating, doing nothing, your presence affects them. They speak quieter. They stare around fleetingly and either look at you or pointedly don’t. They talk about you. They make no effort to hide it. It’s irrelevant. You aren’t quite something that can hear them and care. You are the animal that for some reason has been permitted to shuffle through their halls. You are rude. This is shouted at you across the room once. Whisper whisper, lots of glances, and then suddenly one bright girl’s voice rising, “I don’t know, how about we ask - Hey! Why are you so fucking rude?”

You stare hard, and imagine her having a moment of recognition, of understanding - you imagine the whole universe turning its clearest mirror on her and her face crumbling as she realizes how much of a _hypocrite_ she is. Instead, she laughs and turns back from your gaze, uncaring. You don’t try to contradict her. You rarely try to educate, these days. You rarely leave your room at all.

-

There is a looped footage poster in the waiting room to Dr. Chan’s office - _he’s_ in it, waving from what you recognize as the big dark portrait room they snuck you through in the dead of night. No portrait in it yet, of course. Him and his classmates are dressed for graduation, silver buttons gleaming on their coats, all of them grinning predatorily out of the looping poster. “Astris - Where Heroes are Grown.”

The thing is - it’s younger-him, about the same age as your classmates, about The Calabi Clone’s age. But it’s not _him_. Bizarrely, here at what is essentially the same stage of life, the two share more differences than in any other rendition or photograph you’ve seen. And you’ve managed to see _quite a few_ for someone who has literally never sought one out. Is it just because you sort of know him, now? Sort-of-maybe know him. If you hadn’t seen Roy Calabi rolling clumsily around in zero G, would he still look just the same as this image?

You wonder if Roy Calabi ever comes in here. Looks at this stringy, hardened version of himself and ???? (You find yourself unsure what his reaction would be)

“Elliott Blue, Dr. Chan will see you now,” a smooth automated voice on the wall abruptly says, and you jump, walking quickly from the waiting room to the only other door, which swishes open to reveal Dr. Chan’s office. A shocking contrast from the grey, minimalistic waiting room, Dr. Chan’s office is a torrent of color. Woven rugs and stark prints on the walls, an enormous lumpy leather couch, knick-knacks glinting cluttered on shelves and over her desk, and Dr. Chan herself - decked out in some kind of triangle-design vividly colored shawl, lips and eyes accentuated with black, green, and burgundy paint, a fat shiny silver something holding back her hair.

Surrounded and caked in by all this color, she herself is rather simple - all blacks and whites and browns. This is basically always your view of humans, though this room and this female are both rather extreme examples. They seem to hoard brilliant colors like they’re trying to make up for their natural lack of it. A display like this would be almost _perverse_ in its vividity back home, but Dr. Chan swoops from her desk over to the chair by the couch and plops easily down in the middle of the scene, gesturing for you to do the same like it’s not weird, so you decide it must not be and try not to gape or get too flustered.

“So. I heard you and Mr. Calabi are becoming rather close,” Dr. Chan says as you sit down, getting right to the point.

You stare at her. After a moment when it becomes clear she wants you to _answer to this_ , somehow, you say, “I suppose?” All wavering question. You’re an uncertain, innocent little space dove. You are definitely not a mind-opening social infiltrator slowly corrupting one of the most powerful of the next generation of human warriors, HA HA HA.

She looks at you shrewdly. You stare back at her, blinking dolefully. Secretly feeling suddenly, fiercely proud for the first time in a _long_ time. A very, very long time. “Do you have a problem with that?” You ask when another uncomfortable length of time passes without anyone talking.

“No. It’s just a little _unexpected_ , is all. Don’t you agree it’s kind of unexpected?”

“Not particularly.”

“Oh, Mr. Blue. You can’t be serious.”

“Why are you so surprised? Is it because he very nearly _attacked_ me in front of countless witnesses only a few weeks ago?” Dr. Chan very carefully does not react, but you see her pupils widen. Something ugly curls in your gut. “But that’s not it, is it? He clearly, publically threatens me, and there is no reaction, nothing. It’s only when we both start speaking like civilized people that we become a _concern_.”

“From what I hear, Mr. Calabi stumbled into you unintentionally. The interaction progressed until you were both speaking at heightened volumes. It resolved without physical altercation.”

“Yes, because I _ran from him_.” You hiss, and as soon as the words are out you regret them.

Dr. Chan’s eyebrows come together, her face tilted to the side. You glare. “You know,” she says after a moment, “I understand this will sound… pretty damn stupid, I mean. Especially to you. But I swear on my life - honest to god, I don’t think Roy Calabi would have attacked you.”

You let out a whistling huff, look away, and don’t say anything to that.

“Well?” Dr. Chan asks after a while.

“Well what?”

“Do you believe me?”

“... No.”

She lets out a huff, “Then why are you spending night and day with the boy?”

“What else am I supposed to do?”

“I dunno. Make friends with people who are less… literally war propaganda? Maybe Mary Maeda, or Simone Phan. That’s who I predicted. I’ll tell ya what - I actually had a lot of predictions about how this would go before the term started, and so far it’s been _nothing_ like what I thought,” she says, and you can’t help it, you laugh at little, because it’s sort of comforting to know you’re not alone in that. She widens her eyes, “I sort of thought - a few would actively, relentlessly bully you. There’d be a lot of inherited rage, you know. Lots of the kids here are descended from soldiers. Or worse, people who sat on their asses and told the soldiers where to go and who to kill. I thought there’d be some violence. I had a few folks I was gonna keep an eye on, you know. I didn’t want them to hurt you. There was also a few I thought you might click with. Now, Roy Calabi was not in either of those categories. My expectations for Calabi were that he’d avoid contact at all costs. I thought he wasn’t really gonna be someone I had to worry about. Well, unless you were mad, I suppose. I won’t pretend that thought didn’t occur to me.”

“Oh, but why would _I_ be mad,” you mutter, and Dr. Chan snorts and looks away.

“So can you maybe see, just a little, why it’s sorta weird?”

“Weird?”

“Unexpected. Just a wee bit unexpected, that Calabi isn’t hiding and you aren’t too angry to look at him properly.”

Technically, you want to say, both are sort of true. Calabi was hiding. Is still hiding, honestly. And you definitely have some trouble looking at him properly. Across from you in your room, uncomfortably attempting nonchalance in the face of murder, jumping around the anti-grav gym giggling, insisting on involving himself even though it upsets him and you, so from his perspective there’s really no clear benefit you can find, none at all, for associating himself with you, which is _worrying_. All with that face, that familiar face, the face that’s always smirked out of your textbooks, lorded over hospitals and prisons and everything in-between. Calabi doesn’t have to open his mouth to be against you, really. Because whatever else he’s said, he’s always said it with _that face_. That face. Down below you in the library, intruding on the safest space you’ve found, saying _“I’m sorry-”_

“I,” You start, and then stop. Dr. Chan goes very still. She says nothing - just puts the whole huge weight of her listening ears on you, waiting for you to finish, and you swallow, looking down at your claws, picking at them instead of focusing fully on her, “I would like to ask you to please, as a professional in the field of human psychology, explain the concept of apologizing for others.”

She blinks, underwhelmed, it seems, “Apologizing for others?”

“Yes. What’s the goal? Am I supposed to forgive the person apologizing, or the… others?”

“Well,” She says, and squints, and you have another one of those swooping moments of instinctive interpretation confusing what you logically know that expression means when it’s on her face, “I mean, I guess first of all, you don’t _have_ to forgive anyone. An apology in general is like… begging for forgiveness. It’s not really ‘and now I’ve said this, and we’re done!’ though I’ll admit that’s how a lot of us try to use them.”

“Yes,” you say, “I understand that. But I’ve never heard someone apologize for someone else. Is that - I mean, is he begging me to forgive them along with him?”

“You’re talking about Roy Calabi, right?”

You stare at her and don’t respond.

“I think you should start from the beginning. I mean, I’ll be better able to help you that way, won’t I?” When you don’t say anything to that, when your claws are just digging deeper into each other, when you don’t look up she speaks again, and this time her voice is harder, somehow, like this is important, like she needs you to talk to her, rather than the other way around. “You know about the laws, right? How legally I’m not allowed to tell anyone what any of my students say during a private session.”

“That’s not true. In certain circumstances you are, in fact, legally bound to report everything I’ve ever said - “

“Well, yeah, but that’s just if I consider you a threat-”

“I’ve been _considered a threat_ since before I got here!” You snap back at her, and she closes her mouth.

For a long pause you just look at each other across the table. She is looking at you _oddly._ Confused, maybe. Upset? You know you’re glaring, you know your crest is back, you know you look _like a threat_ right now. Well, good. She might as well get scared now, rather than later. Maybe you’ll even be sent home.

_But you don’t want that you don’t want that you don’t want that no no no no no you’re **not allowed to want that shut up shut up and try harder you weak, stupid, pathetic little failure, you don’t get to run home just because you’ve made this a mess -**_

Dr. Chan stands up. Turns, faces the bookshelves behind her, and reaches into the mouth of a clay statue that’s been gaping at you since you walked in. Out of it comes what is clearly, unmistakably, a small camera. You are unsurprised. Something very deep in your bones _hurts_ , yeah, but you are also _unsurprised_.

“It’s off,” she says, gesturing to the light, which is indeed dim, “I wasn’t ever going to turn it on. But some asshole put it there when we knew you were coming. Said basically what you said - that you were a threat, and if you ever came into my office I was to consider it an exception. That I had the legal right to record you without your knowledge.” She slides it across the endtable. It glints tiny and unobtrusive before you. “But I don’t want that. I don’t want to record any of my students. Because this is where they come to _freak out_. That’s my job - I’m here for when you need to freak out a little, and for when you need questions answered, and for when you generally need to reveal parts of yourself you don’t want on camera. I don’t want to spy on you or anyone. So, now. You have a question. One that’s sort of difficult to answer. And you’re one of my students, so you ask _me._ That’s my job, Elliott. That’s my job and I want to do it well.”

The clock ticks. She looks at you. You look down, wrap your arms around yourself and dig your claws into your sides for a moment. You say, “Why didn’t you show me the camera in the beginning of the meeting, then?”

She sighs, “I didn’t really know if I should. That’s siding with you, isn’t it? You over them. Turning on the camera is siding with them. I figured just leaving it off but there was like, the compromise. But I shouldn’t have done that. I should’ve sided with you from the beginning, same as I would with any of my students.” She takes a breath then, stealing herself, before bluntly, blatantly saying, to your shock, “I didn’t because you’re a stellaraptor, and I have a lot of bs from the war still rattling around in my head, and I let it influence me because I hadn’t really spoken to you yet and I was still sort of nervous, but, well, you were right. You were considered a threat before you deserved to be. And that’s not fair. I’m sorry about that. Really, truly sorry. And I guess I’m sorry for the people who perverted my beautiful frog statue by making it a vessel through which they planned to spy on a kid in therapy. But I’m not asking you to forgive them when I say that. I’m saying I wish they hadn’t done it to begin with. And that I wish I hadn’t as well, but also - forgive me, please, please. Talk to me, Elliott. Let me help you, even if it’s just with little questions like this. I think you need someone to talk to.”

To your _horror,_ for the third time in only a few months, you burst into tears in front of a human you barely know.

Dr. Chan doesn’t try to comfort you with touch the way The Diplomat did, and she doesn’t react with confused terror the way Roy did. She instead offers you a box of tissues and leans towards you, waiting patiently, not saying anything. Her eyebrows are pushed together. Her eyes are squinting, the way people who love and trust each other look. She doesn’t know you and the expression means ‘evaluation’ to her rather than _that,_ but you feel it all the same. Some bizarre, instinctual comfort that hasn’t caught up with reality yet.

After a little too long in the quiet you grab a tissue just to have something to do. Burry your face in it and soak up the tears, take a deep breath, and then say, “He apologized for his classmates? That doesn’t mean he wants me to forgive them, right? He doesn’t seem to even _like_ them. It was what you were saying, I think - that he wishes they’d never done it.”

“Did they do something specific? Or -”

“N-nooooo,” You wobble, and then you’re dissolving again, sobbing quietly, and Dr. Chan asks questions, softly probing, not too intrusive, and lets you tell the stories. You insult everyone. Accuse all her probably very beloved human students of being cruel with live evidence to back it up and she doesn’t interrupt you or try to explain their sins away.

“You handled that very well,” She says, “You can’t teach shit to people who are stuck in their ways,” And “Pah, no, don’t _make_ yourself be with people who aren’t treating you with respect. You shouldn’t gift them with your presence unless they make a space for you. They don’t deserve it.” And a sigh before, “You’re being so _very_ strong and brave here, do you know that? It amazes me. You’re amazing, Elliott.”

You leave an hour later with another appointment a few days from now, a day planner that’s projected from a small stuffed Earth bird when you squeeze it, and a feeling like your insides have been scrubbed through with salt water and are now fresh and clean, lungs better at breathing and feet lighter on the ground.

-

Roy Calabi is a different person when you two are alone. You are mad at him for that, but barely. Not as mad as you feel you should be.

He still looks at you, in public. If he’s in the room you can feel his eyes like a weight, heavier than anyone else’s. He still looks away maybe 80% of the time, when you meet them. Quietly pretending nothing is going on, he wasn’t even looking at all! _Casual._

But then that 20%, the part where he stays - it’s normally because someone is saying something he doubts. That wrinkle comes back. He stares back at you and asks silently, and with a look you can answer him. That’s good. Those moments are good. He still looks away the other times, and you want to be mad at him for that. You _are_ mad at him for that. At the same time though, his social cowardice also dismantles at least the foundation of your fear of him - he won’t even make prolonged eye-contact with you. He’s a very nervous creature, really.

So normally you’re fine with the fact that he won’t look at you in public, and you think that’s very mature of yourself, really, until the ‘fine’ you feel when he avoids your attention begins to morph into this sort of twisted understanding. He flinches away from contact and you think ‘well, of course he does,’ and crouch lower, look away. So it’s not really maturity, you don’t think, if it comes with this much shame. You stop going out in public with him altogether. It’s not like it was doing any good, anyway.

There was a point early on when it seemed like this experience was going to, if nothing else, feed your pride till it was gagging. You’d hold your head high and sneer down at them as they tried to sneer up at you. The rush of strength in the face of them didn’t last long, though. Now you understand them, sometimes. Understand why Roy would avoid looking too closely at you. Understand that he only listens sometimes, in private, and that that’s different than throwing himself into the pit of association.

Dr. Chan very strongly dislikes the fact that you know this truth and will insist endlessly that you lie to yourself about it, but that concept is sort of ridiculous to you, especially since the evidence is all around. You taint their conversations, even from across the room. Imagine what you’d do to Roy, if anyone were to see you two talking.

There’d be no point. And some part of you _knows_ , terribly, that there is no hope, here. You’re where you’ll always be to them, and he’s up there, and the self-hate here is _embarrassing_ , you realize that. It’s the kind of thing you used to sneer at in classmates back home who’d try so hard to shape their crests down with headbands and spray, wear long sleeves that hide their arms, try to _be_ them and you’re not there yet, you’ll never _be there_ but you are starting to see something unnatural in the mirror. You are starting to feel your movements like creaking, wrongly-formed machinery. You are starting to feel like what they see you as. And that is terrifying.

They shouldn’t be allowed to do that. They own everything else about this place, they inhabit every other space, there is no place you can go that is not _their territory,_ even your own room is shaped inconvenient, made for their hands and feet and eyes, and when things don’t work right for you it’s your fault, it’s your mistake for being unprepared for this. Now even in your head they’re laying claim on something. You hear their little murmurs as you’re falling asleep in your too-hot, too-low, too-soft bed. Sometimes they look more natural to you than your own limbs. They’re the correct thing, here, and you are not, and you try not to _know_ that but the hate sneaks up in your bones and swoops you away with it.

You’ve started to leave whole sections blank when you send your weekly reports back. It doesn’t matter. There’s nothing to add - nothing you even have the energy to do anymore. All you’re trying to do is survive. You know it’s not right - not good, to waste this. Granted, you are wasting it, but that’s just by being a waste, by having failed already, and so thoroughly. It seems another level of wrong to not even try for more, even though at this point it feels like you’re trying to knock over a brick wall by flicking pebbles at it.

Except with Roy. With Roy you’re trying to knock over a lawn chair with pebbles. Still pretty impossible, but you can see it wobbling. Can feel him wobbling, behind you.

Grooming sessions are probably the best thing that’s happened so far. You look and feel much calmer, and sort of like maybe a part of who you used to think you were is back. It’s a lie. You’ve seen what’s really inside yourself. They’ve peeled you back and made you look, and it’s ugly and bitter and weak, but who you used to think you were absolutely definitely _loved_ being groomed. Loved being close and easy with someone, loved the lazy conversation, loved the isolation of just a few or just one - no crowds, no regulation, no expectations. Loved grooming too, though Roy has only just stopped flinching when you accidentally brush against him, so you can’t really see that one happening any time soon.

But he grooms you, and each session comes with this moment of peace afterwards, comfortable peace where you can talk and he’ll listen, easily. Ask you questions, and with increasing frequency they’re _good_ questions, and he believes you. He doesn’t always like it. You’re so careful - you can feel yourself walking a fine line with him, sometimes. But he believes you, and that’s something.

It’s actually sort of weird because before, when this trip was big and exciting and far off, you’d fantasized rather comprehensively about how it would go. You’d thought about getting everyone listening to the point where most were even united on your side, arguing with teachers and their parents. Just a whole team of peers you’d educated into being good. Of course, complete success was unrealistic, and even pretty boring, in terms of fantasy life. So you’d also imagined maybe a few stubborn students who refused to believe you. They were all straight-forward terrible and definitely the minority, and your newly educated human friends had regular all-out brawls with them in the hallways, as was their way.

You tried to discourage that. Spoke a lot about nonviolence in the Intergalactic Culture Club they’d begged you to run and said stuff like “I don’t blame them! They’re just ignorant. And their ignorance keeps them from experiencing the wonders of our beautiful, boundary-breaking friendship, so. I pity them.”

And your loyal humans said things like, “Oh Elliott, you’re so beautiful and kind and altruistic!”

And you’d reply, “I know. So please, try to be like me and don’t punish these poor souls just because their parents have taught them hate,” but they were all just too passionately loyal to you, and a reaction like this to loyalty really did seem to just be part of their nature, so. Not much you could do, tragically. The fights for your honor went on.

The dissenters were usually smaller versions of humans that had wronged you in your life at home. The mechanics teacher who’d accused you of cheating on a too-impressive project, made an enormous fuss with the board and instigated that huge investigation, but when everything came back clean gave you a B- for an ‘immature presentation of your work.’ The tourist at the supermarket who’d grabbed the youngest of your kin when you were shopping - picked her up like a doll and took a picture, laughed when she starting crying and had security called on your ___ when he snatched her back and shoved the tourist away. The soldiers who’d fractured your friend’s skull when they thought she was taking pictures of them but really she was just playing a game, fooling around on her phone, minding her own business, and she still got fined, _she still got blamed for their trouble._

All these straight-forward villains, but tiny! Wearing the uniform, being regularly beaten by your new friends. And their pack was lead, of course, by the Calabi clone. Who grinned just like that portrait, all the time, and was your greatest adversary. Though not nearly as socially powerful as you, of course. You’d formed too much of a stable, educated community of allies to consider him a real threat, by the end of your time at Astris. But you two had some great villain vs hero intellectual standoffs, there, in the beginning.

Nothing’s really worked out the way you were expecting it to.

-

You walk past it on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Jet Calabi, grinning down on the mortals, the only thing in the room. You always _make eye contact_. So he knows, see. That you’re threatening him.

You’re walking past him, _staring him down_ when you hear it - a quick, “Excuse me, uh, Elliott Blue?”

You stop. Turn slowly, prepared. A fleeting, quick smile greets you and you blink - dark skin, medium build, glasses, hair in sort of woven ropes - Mary Maeda. She pronouns, has never spoken to you before, and Dr. Chan is absolutely convinced you two should be where you and Roy are at now.

“Yes, Mary Maeda?”

She seems flustered, “Uh, see, I’m doing an astrocartography project, and I’m looking into Empyrean’s moons, but there seems to be some… conflicting information, you know. So I was just wondering if you could clear something up for me - is the one moon called Var or Vor?”

You stare at her and weigh your options. After careful consideration, you say, clear and confidently as you can, “Neither.”

She blinks, “Uhh…”

“Do you have time before your next class?”

“Well, yeah, I’m actually done for the day-”

“Wonderful, me too! Lets go to the library.”

“... Alright!”

She follows you at something of a distance. You walk slowly, barely resisting clicking your claws for her to hurry up. Later on she’s slumped over a table with you in the library, listening wide-eyed and watching as you draw out your solar system. “So, you see, the names you used-”

“They were the human names for your moons.”

“Correct.”

She whistles. “Well. I’m guessing what the Prof’s actually gonna be looking for is the human names.”

You stiffen, “Well. I apologize for wasting your time, then.” You say cooly, capping your ink too quickly and nearly spilling it.

“Wait, no! I don’t mean - damn, I’m sorry. I mean - it sucks that they’ll want that, right? Instead of any of the _real_ names. It sucks that they’ll ask for the… the human ones.”

Your hands still, and then drop to your lap. “Yes,” you reply, “It does _suck.”_

She laughs, and for a long while you two sit in what you dare to call companionable silence, her looking over your map, you carefully cleaning the ink off your claws. Abruptly she blurts out, “You know, we can hang out sometime.”

You look up at her, eyes wide and blinking fast, “Ok,” you say, _way_ too quickly, and she giggles. Remembering yourself, you bare your teeth, smiling.

“Cool,” She says, grinning back at you,“I’ll catch you later, then.”

“Alright.”

“Thank you, Elliott.”

“You’re welcome.”

She touches your shoulder as she passes by. The contact zings.

Later on, she waves at you in the hallway, pointedly. You wave back, smiling. This goes on. She doesn’t approach you again. She doesn’t ‘catch you later,’ really. You two never really hang out again. For sure she doesn’t end up eating cinnamon toast crunch with you in your room every morning like _your other success_ , not that you’d expected her to go that far (maybe only hoped). But she greets you with open friendliness in the hallway. Makes eye-contact for a moment. Doesn’t stop when other people look at her strange for it.

It’s kind of sad how much that means to you, at this point.

-

Roy has small eyes under a heavy brow bone, a large jaw, the same features you’ve always seen. His face is like clay, and it is constantly changing, revealing everything. You think you’ve reached it, maybe - the point where you can get all of the conversation. So much of it happens on another level - you know now, sort of, what his specific expressions are. You can hear them in his voice. That little indentation between his eyebrows is almost always there, these days, when you are speaking to him for real.

Cautiously, you venture out of your room. Roy follows. You keep looking behind you at first - desperately hoping, praying, don’t change now, stay the way you were in there, don’t turn back into what you used to be when people other than me were watching you.

You make yourself leave your room because Dr. Chan’s very cautiously suggested it as a good idea, and you think you might have gotten too comfortable, anyway. And because you have a job to do. And because after all that work with Roy, you still wonder if you’ve done anything at all, and you can’t stand hiding and waiting. You have to find out on your own, of your own volition. You have to see him walk into their territory but keep looking at you.

He does.

You feel relief, and then anger, both at yourself and him, because it was a question at all. Turn away so as to not confuse him. You’re confused enough for both of you.

It goes on like this, though. He keeps standing near you, and sometimes when the others are watching you think something shifts in him - he goes _defiant,_ maybe even, and something in you glows. More and more people listen to you, now. With him behind you, it’s like they’re finally able to hear you - like you’ve been babbling until now and he’s your translation device, here to validate your own experiences. A fair number still ignore you, a fair number still glare, silently. But there are still enough. Mary Maeda and a few of her friends. A soft-spoken but shrewdly clever person named Jessie with wild hair and indeterminate gender. A grinning overly-friendly boy named Eddy. Quite a few folks who seem to only be along for the ride, but they ask you good questions, sometimes, mixed in with the silly ones. You have an audience, now. For the first time since coming here, you have an audience. When you speak, they pay attention.

Most of them don’t respect you. You’ve shifted from freak attraction to hostile threat to reclusive weirdo to living walking talking google, and people don’t really _respect_ living walking talking google, but at least they ask you questions. They ask you real questions. Lean in and listen, actually listen, actually approach you in a non-hostile way. Even if they can still get a little too handsy, sometimes.

At one point a classmate moves to touch your crest like they used to all the time in the beginning and you _feel_ Roy react behind you, a sudden tensing, the slightest noise, almost a cough, though you suspect based on the results it might be something _else_ \- you don’t even see his face, but the classmate’s hand drops before foreign fingers can bury themselves in your feathers again like you invited them there. They giggle nervously, they are _scared_ and when you realize why it’s like a burning sizzle of terrible relief, shifting in your head until you’re sad again, because you’re _really good_ these days at turning happiness into sadness again, it’s like, a special skill you’ve developed, here. Literally anything can eventually make you sad if you think about it long enough! You can make quite a roller coaster out of it, too. Right here, it goes like this:

  1. Ahhhahahhaa!!!! I stole him right out from under your nose. He’s mine, now. Fear us. Never touch me again. Gaze upon me and _my_ giant space clone and tremble.
  2. No but really, that’s not what they’re thinking, is it. They’re really scared because _I_ belong to _him_ in their heads. Not because he’s sided with me - because he’s claimed me. They’re respecting his claim - not my own personal space. And that’s very extremely fucked up, thank you.
  3. But they’ve always been fucked up. At least they fear me, now.
  4. Fear _us._ Us. Both of us - War Criminal Clone and Rude Bird Alien combo deal! Propaganda League, here to strike fear into the hearts of the privileged! Eyyyyyy.
  5. Roy will protect me. If he thinks I’m in danger, even of just being uncomfortable, Roy will protect me. He just did it, instinctively.
  6. I don’t have to be afraid of him, anymore.
  7. THAT’S A DANGEROUS ASSUMPTION



You don’t look at Roy for the rest of the meal and feign exhaustion that night so he leaves you alone early, just goes home (or more likely, to the library or gym, somewhere else because of that weird territorial mating spat he has going on with his roommate, so he probably just wandered around, and you _do not feel guilty about that because there is no reason to feel guilty you absolutely should not feel guilty so you just don’t)_ and the next morning he shows up to your room with a big bowl of not-apology-cereal and a confused, wounded expression on his face. So you eat the cereal and you sit nice and close to him and start a conversation you know he won’t fail at - let him chatter happily on about nothing because it’s not his fault, really, that he’s so much to blame for everything wrong in your universe.

Like - it is his _problem_ , for sure. But he might as well not be _sad._

_-_

You are unsure if the picture on the pamphlet on Dr. Chan’s desk is Jet Calabi or Roy Calabi or, quite possibly, some other human. It’s not a picture you’ve ever seen of the first one, and you sort of doubt the second would consent to being in a pamphlet. Perhaps he didn’t have a choice? Then again, perhaps it’s just another human with enough similarities that it’s confusing you. If it is, that’s sort of embarrassing, so you don’t say anything. Just stare.

“So I guess it’s all winding down then, huh.” Dr. Chan says, and you look back up at her quickly.

“I suppose.”

“Any final thoughts?”

“... I’m not really at the end yet, so no.”

“No… pre-final thoughts?”

“Pre-final?”

“Like, it’s not the _final,_ but it’s down the wire, you’re rounding up, you have a human posse and a bestie and a lot of people listen to you now so I’d say this is probably gonna be a won game by the end, so as someone who must _know_ they kind of owned it, do you have any thoughts before the end about how, exactly, you _dominated?”_

You bite down on a giggle a little too late, and Dr. Chan throws her head back and laughs, infectiously.

You two talk - about what you’ve taught others this week, and you teach her, too, and she listens avidly, and then you open up your day planner again - it’s now full, you’re scheduled all week to help out with various projects, attend a club meeting, a movie night. So full she encourages you to schedule ‘you time’ and you do, though still, you doubt you’ll be alone. You’re not sure if you really want to be. These days you always feel jumbled and stressed, so busy you barely have time to think about the fast-approaching end, and being alone-alone could poison those thoughts up fast. Your calendar is still counting down the days from weeks ago, when looking at that ‘29’ was what gave you life, thinking about how it was only that many until you were home. Now you’re in the single digits and it’s more like time is running out. You are losing something you’ve only just gained, and quickly.  

At the end of the meeting when you’re putting your jacket back on you’re having trouble with the top buttons and she leans forward and helps you without asking or being asked. You blink up at her, and she blinks down at you, her face a little flushed, her lips a tight line. For a moment you just stare at each other. And then she abruptly, lightly _punches your arm_ and says, “Good luck, kid. It’ll all be over, soon.”

You touch your arm, taken aback.

“Oh. It’s, uh. An affectionate thing. Not… I didn’t just _punch_ -you-punch-you, ok? Please don’t get me fired.”

“I suppose I won’t. You have been rather helpful to me this year.” You say with mock reproach.

“Well, I’m happy to have been useful enough,” She says, smiling. She reaches out a hand and you take it solemnly in yours. Her grip is stronger than Roy’s, than Mary’s, than Jessie’s or Eddy’s. More confident. But her hand is surprisingly fragile - delicate bones beneath softer skin, and you are shocked to notice that you can see some of her veins running beneath the surface. Small blue rivers. She’s older than you thought she was. And when she pulls back, she does an abrupt head-only bow with a quick rebound. You do the same back.

(It unfortunately sort of worked out that you didn’t tell her after the second time she did it, at the end of your first session with her, because she’d just been so very kind and open and you were feeling very delicate and you just didn’t want her to hate you, so you didn’t say anything, and then she’d just _kept doing it,_ and after a while it’s like, a little awkward to correct, you know? So. It is just your thing with her, now. You guys do it every time you say goodbye. You figure if she ever meets another stellaraptor and does it, they’ll just figure it’s _her_ thing, so, like. Whatever.)

The door closes and you’re in the empty grey hallway, so different from her cluttered rainbow of a room, the tiny bird schedule cupped in your hand.

-

Roy’s hands are short, but wide. Stubby fingers with tiny, too-thin claws no good for much - they must be left-over from when humans had larger, more useful ones, though you can’t see how evolution anywhere could ever have deemed strong claws unnecessary. The palms are too-long and smoothly rising and falling, little hills over his bones where the callous is a bit rougher, all of it striped over with an indented design he lets you trace one day. Or, at the very least, he doesn’t protest when you grab his hand after grooming and examine it for a while, trying to memorize the pattern (like a web, like lightning, like a bunch of thin sticks dropped) because that’s the best part, you think. You’re tempted to ask him to ink it over and and stamp a print in your notebook, but you think that might be going too far. You think you might have already gone too far - it’d taken you a while to notice him squirming and staring tight-lipped at your claw tracing those lines. He never _says_ anything is the problem, there. Never pulls back when he doesn’t want to be touched, and it makes you nervous about touching him at all. It seems (dangerously, stupidly) inconceivable these days, but still. Maybe someday all at once whatever you’re doing will be too much and you’ll be faced with the beast from the caf again, all flared nostrils and fists instead of these flat, wide palms. There’s no slow progression, inside his head, with his feelings. He’s always either still and silent or boiling over.

His hands are different, though. His hands can move slowly, even if his head hasn’t caught up to that idea, yet. They start at the top of your head and work downwards in deep, small circles, dragging out the feathers that are stuck sideways, working their way out of you as if in protest. You’re not at your best, feather-wise, right now. You look ridiculous really, all patchy and shedding, stress chewing your normally carefully-groomed self up and spitting you back out in a reflection of how you feel, but he doesn’t notice. Doesn’t realize, probably.

(Honestly you could probably sprout a second head and Roy would think it was just some weird stellaraptor quirk. He’d be polite about it, though, is the thing. You can imagine him, not saying anything, grooming the second head and talking lightly about _studying-)_

His hands are at your back, now. Surprisingly cool and solid.

It’s not like grooming at home. At home there’s a familiar precision, long claws combing deftly through at a practiced rhythm. Roy has no practice, no speed, no familiarity, and his fingers are blunt instruments. He talks pretty consistently throughout these sessions, too. But he doesn’t try to imitate, doesn’t even know what to imitate, and that makes it a new thing, sort of incomparable while still bizarrely, comfortingly familiar. Just like a lot of Roy-things.

His hands drop and your breath stutters cold in your lungs as you realize how close the conversation has strayed to something that’s still a little too raw - something that’s locked down tight because you can’t let it distract you now, it’s just a little too close to the surface for you to be that perfect little educator, objective and impassive, but Roy has it, has caught some end of it and is digging deeper but you can’t-

You can feel his knees against your back. You can feel the whole story in your throat, but it has a weight and roughness to it that’s familiar. You fear it won’t come out in clean-cut, calm, objective words.

Would that be so bad, though?

Your ____ used to tell you crying in front of someone was like handing them a part of your soul. He tore it out of you before, but you could hand it to him now, you think. Just stop. Stop being the perfect little educator. Just tell him in rough, terrible, emotionally compromised words what happened - what they did to you, why you were late. He would take them. You are so sure - so _very_ sure that it wouldn’t be like the last time, that he wouldn’t jolt away from you, fear your tears, be confused or angered by them - he would welcome that part of you, wouldn’t he? He’d keep you safe here, same as he does out there. You’ve been so careful with him, but you’re succeeding with others. He doesn’t have to be your student. You have other students, now. You don’t need Roy to be that. Roy could be something else, instead. Roy could be someone you could cry in front of.

(Thinking like that is dangerous, though. Isn’t it.)

Grab his hand. Bring it up to your jaw and shut your eyes again.

It’s easier, to keep him incomparable. If anything, that’s even more comfortable than what’s familiar, here. What’s familiar here is all just a little dangerous.

_It’ll all be over soon, anyway._

_-_

The portrait is the same one you’ve always seen, blown up huge.

White brown black eyes, brown face, black hair. A grin you have never seen affixed to Roy. Shoulders straighter than you’ve ever seen them, too. You can pick at all the differences, focus on the hairs on his face, the eyebrows, the way his hair is messier, the way Roy can be _trusted_ , like people didn’t _trust_ this one - still trust him, the way they trust Roy. Because they _trust_ Roy. They trust Roy to look like him. Wear his face, smile pleasantly, and have all their rhetoric, everything they believe stamped onto his forehead. They trust him to step on you, in the end. Choose them over you, choose easy over _you_ , forget you, forget Empyrean, and relax into what they provide for him, while across the universe you and yours blip quietly into extinction, or something worse.

They trust him. And that means you can’t.

That’s really all it boils down to.

You wonder if Jet Calabi ducked his head when he smiled or unconsciously tensed up and bared his teeth when he played video games. You’ve never really _imagined_ him at all - he’s just there, everywhere, grinning and posing for portraits and killing a tenth of your planet in one go. You wonder if you would’ve trusted him, too, if you met him at school.

You hear heavy, shuffling footsteps coming towards you and stopping. Glance his way, and he looks uncomfortable, closed. You turn your back on the portrait quickly without thinking about it, embarrassed without meaning to be.

For a long moment, you two just stare at each other.

“Ready to go?” he asks. His voice is tired, cracking from disuse. There are dark circles under his eyes.

Shrug. “I’ve packed all my things,” you say, gesturing behind you. He blinks, and you blink back, and you both think it - the familiarity of the motion, what it normally means. You drop your hand.

Other students are leaning against each other, touching each other, dropping heads close and linking hands. Roy shuffles his feet, moving maybe a half inch closer to you, and you sway forwards, very slightly. It wouldn’t be too strange, right, if you two-

“So,” Roy says, “How was your semester?”

You stop.

_How was your semester?_

“Challenging,” You say after a while, because it’s honestly the only true thing you can think to say.

The corner of his mouth twitches and his gaze drops. “I’m sure so,” he says, looking at you through his eyelashes, _squinting_ , and your chest aches.

You hold the words in your mouth before you say them, cautiously, “What about you?”

He slumps, shuffling awkwardly, “Uh. More exciting than I bargained for,” he says, and you look away, “But, uh, I’m glad.”

There are two marble tiles between you and him on the floor. Two and a half, maybe even. You look up to see how many other people have between them and realize there are a _lot_ of eyes on you two - more than usual, even. They’re all just watching. Waiting to see what will happen next, like it’s a play, like you two aren’t real people, and you balk, gripping your backpack straps and turning back to him with wide eyes.

“How do you want to say goodbye?” Roy whispers, “We could shake hands. We’ve done that before.

“What would you normally do? With your other friends?” You whisper back.

He laughs softly, “Hug, probably. It’s less formal. More, uh, affectionate.”

“Hug, please. Thank you for asking.”

He smiles, and then you two are ducking together, the space between you disappearing. He is wide and solid in your arms. You can feel his chest rising and falling, enormous lungs filling, heart rolling slowly through each beat. His arms lift and he is... hitting you?

Hitting your back. He slaps your back three times. _What_.

“Well,” Roy says, as you two pull away, “That happened.”

“Probably a historic moment,” you mutter, thinking about Dr. Chan punching you and wondering if that, too, was then something. Violence is even more linked with human affection than you previously imagined.

Roy snorts, “If my family finds out about that, they will _flip_ a _shit.”_

You look up at him at that one, but he’s just smiling, his eyebrows up as if to say ‘families, right,’ like you two are talking about a bad grade or something, “Yeah,” you say, crest twitching, “Likewise.”

“BYE, ELLIOTT!” Someone _screams_ behind you, and you jump, but when you turn back to Roy he only smiles small at you, doesn’t do that _thing_ where he tightens up and stares down whoever’s threatening you, so you guess maybe no one is.

There are more hoots and cries, more people yelling things out at you, and you lift a hand and wave very cautiously, which seems to just encourage your audience.

“Excuse me, gentlemen.”

Your hand drops and you turn, fast. Your diplomat.

“Elliott,” she says, and then nods at Roy, “Mr. Calabi, good to see you. Ready to go?” You gesture at your backpack. She nods, “Lets go then. We have a long trip ahead of us.”

You hesitate. Roy looks back at you, and you both seem to be on the edge, trying to find something to say that will finish this thing, conclude it, because there’s nothing resolved here, nothing that seems like it’ll close up neatly when you go.

“Have, uh, a good flight!” he says. Higher pitched, on the edge.

You nod, trying to think of what to say back, but then he’s distracted, Dr. Chan accosting him out of nowhere, and you are lead away. You look back once, at them. The tallest and the shortest people you met here, but Roy’s still cowering and glaring as she tells him off about _something,_ speaking to him with more aplomb than she normally speaks to you.

Laura’s fingers tighten on your shoulder and you lean into her side - solid and real, painfully familiar, and then you’re on one ship and then another and then headed home, home, home.

Home - under your feet, around you, people who look like you making you natural again, the world so bright and full that within just a few hours, Astris wasn’t real. None of it was real. You’re on the deck with practiced claws dashing through your feathers, familiar little faces focused raptly on you as you tell them about the space-walk. The anti-grav gym. The food.

Careful topics. Repeated several ways over the coming days.

As the days go by, as you slip _so easily_ back into your life, your home, your gentle, lovely existence with people who look like you and aren’t afraid to touch you, people who love you, Roy sort of distorts. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say he becomes clearer.

You were afraid, and you were alone, and he was the only person being nice to you at all. It has to be that. He can’t quite be what you’re remembering him as, you think. And then when the article comes out, when from so far away these people still manage to make you small and lesser and _pathetic,_ even take away your ability to speak, and he says _nothing_ to defend you, reveals not even an ounce of rage on your behalf, well.

It wasn’t real. You were alone, you were scared, and he was nice. But he was just ‘nice.’ Roy will not protect you, after all.

You were right, then. All along.

There’s a family meeting about the article. Your generation of kin claim not to have read it, but they look at you _strange_ , look at you sideways, and you feel exposed, like they can see the marks of his hands on your head and face, though they don’t know, no one _knew_ about that, but what the article did tell them was still damning enough.

The adults call you in. Ask you a lot of questions, and embarrassingly enough, they are cautious, simpering, protective questions. Disgusted, restrained anger on your behalf. They’re grooming you gently, looking at you like you’ve been hurt and you _don’t like it._

It’s _strongly_ “suggested” that you cease communicating with Roy Calabi. You shrug. Shrug, shrug, shrug. Ok. He’s not who you thought you were talking to, anyway. It was all the moment. It was being alone, so _very_ alone, and then having him there. Embarrassing, really. Nothing more than that.

Nothing.

(You wonder if he still has your feather. You can remember so clearly how it looked in his hand - dark blue between his wide brown fingers, thumb running along the edge. His face - sheepish, cowl flopped down near his brow. Calabi’s grin, teeth exposed in bright rows, indentations on his cheeks from smiling.)

You are quiet, but not noticeably so. You just act like yourself. As much like yourself, being normal, as possible. You’re probably not going back to Astris anymore, they say. Good, that’s good, that’s fine. It really is over, then.

That night, you dream of wide, blunt fingers in your feathers. They cart quickly through your crest and down, and then without you asking they are against your jaw, digging slow smooth circles, his knees pressed hard against your back and then dropped to either side of you. His chest is against your shoulder blades. You can feel his great slow heartbeat vibrating in your own ribcage, can feel the pressure of his lungs filling and emptying. You push into his hand so hard you almost topple over and he laughs that short, surprised huff he does when you catch him off-guard. He pushes you back upright but the momentum is too much and you topple to the side, his arm flinging out to catch you, a quick “Shit, sorr-” the ‘sorry’ shut down. You turn back to smirk at him, squinting, and you see his jaw clenched around his teeth, tight little lines of white stones overfilling his mouth, eyebrows flat and sloping, tiny medals for killing things like you glinting down his chest -

Hours later you’re still awake in the dark.


End file.
